


Patient 109

by notrembler22



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Belle POV, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Minor Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 21:12:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1872645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notrembler22/pseuds/notrembler22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She falls like a piece of porcelain; she anticipates the crunch of heartstrings snapping, the crack of bitterness as her dignity seeps into the carpet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patient 109

Patient 109 has been sedated.

The patient has refused food.

The patient has lucid episodes followed by mild psychosis.

These episodes have been steadily growing worse since the anti-depressants were stopped.

The patient no longer responds to her name.

The orderlies do not think Patient 109 will ever be rehabilitated back into Storybrooke society.

Meanwhile, the patient dreams of lingering shadows and wicked teeth.

She cannot help but drift, drugged and isolated as she is. She feels the tug-tug of an undercurrent but she always knew how to swim. She’s strong, good at the front-crawl; she won a prize a long time ago when she was a child, when she was a child. There was a lake. Behind her father’s house, big house, she remembers the lake or was it a pond. Ducks. And water feels soft against her skin as she strains against the persuasive pull, sliding over her skin and clothes, they’re wet through, her skirt balloons out around her, yellow through murky water. Gold silk twists around her ankles and she feels so very heavy. It would be nice to rest for a while. Don’t swim. There are hands in the water and they grasp.

The patient dreams of dancing light on pebbled skin and a sound, a high clawing sound.

With a small gasp, the patient sits bolt upright, finally awake after years of drifting. The dreams have become more vivid, more intense and she knows that it’s getting harder to leave them behind. The dull, stale light meets her aching eyes, and the walls and ceiling and floor rush in to greet her with a smug sense of self-importance. The orderlies were never as vicious as those four walls. Metal and grey and cold and so often dark that the girl-woman-girl- _woman_ feels naked in the shadows – _backs of her thighs burn with shame_ \- and she shakes her fear and cold from her shoulders in a shudder-shiver-tremble. She gulps the boxed-in air and puts the building-blocks of her remembered being back together, but they don’t fit. There are rough edges to her memory and some sting with the sharp bitterness of forgotten regret and she knows – _she knows_ – she is half finished. There are _pieces_ missing. Like the dissection of a frog – _it was a man once_ \- definitely a frog, it was Biology class, and the heart was missing, the belly spread wide in a mockery of autopsy – _head opened up like a cracked egg what does that tell us about the brain_ –and the legs weren’t supposed to bend that way, either. Scalpel. Her mind feels like Little Jack’s plum pie. There have been fingers in it and she has an inkling more than one of her memories are shop-bought, practically still in the cellophane wrapper. Not played with, like clothes in a dead-girl’s wardrobe.

Numbed by too many thoughts, the patient looks at her feet; socks but no shoes. Not even under the bed, if you can call the metal slab a bed. Don’t look under the bed, they wait for you to put your feet down so they can pinch your toes and gobble you up – _heads consumed like overripe fruit by_ – and take you away to the fairies – _she went willingly_ – who keep the teeth of bad boys and girls. The stories are whispered from under her pillow. She knows she doesn’t have a pillow, but her cheek has lain on cheap cotton before this place, layered over silk and goose feathers, her father’s shoulder and finally, over the pillow of her mother’s breast, brown satin hair and milky skin. And once, there was leather. Leather that made her cheek tingle, but she cannot remember the feather-brush of dragon-hide unless her veins sing with sedatives. Something curls at the edge of her consciousness, like someone’s nimble fingers plucking a lock of her hair. Not grasping, just… tentative. There is a tactile curiosity in the touch, it whispers with soft fingertips, gently rubbing the strands of her bird’s nest hair…

She slides eagerly back into sleep as the strands of her mind ache for those deft fingertips to steal her away – _again_ \- in the night.

She’s spinning, twisting, dancing. She is caught on a piece of glittering string; it tangles around her legs, drawing her into a tighter chrysalis of her own fantasies. She feels like she’s been snagged on silk, so much silk, like a hang-nail. Something smooth moves across her skin, thread. It’s gold thread. Coiled around her ankles and wrists like rope, but cold and hard to the touch, it warms in response to her heated skin like the grasp of a scaly hand. Something inside her grips the fibres of the web and it gently draws her through the eye of a needle; she moves languidly, like thread spilling from the spool. She hangs like ripe fruit, like a resting marionette. Her muscles tense and then relax, falling but not falling at all. The web takes her and she is weightless and paralysed and so very tired. She is the fly, the moth, the tangled child, and the spider is grinning a grin that’s just for her while he closes in. He’s pulling her to him – _he catches her_ -the legs of the twitching spider furl and unfurl and she inches closer in her snug jacket of restraints. The fly goes willingly. She is one for many, to be bound in darkness as a toy, a trinket, a trophy in a room of trophies.

The silent wheel turns and she is drawn through, grain in a mill, she turns from gold into straw and breaks with a quiet gasp as skilled hands bend her. She was a stem, a bud, a promise of fruit waiting and waiting in the long, dusty summer. Now she is ash, she can taste death and power, and gaping black eyes peer into her with hungry abandon. She wants to taste something else with her tongue. She has tasted so much decay.

She dreams of surging pupils meant to terrorise, intent on pain. They pin her down and devour her, each frayed nerve-ending at a time. It’s better than Valium. Something primal shudders under her skin, ‘fight or flight response’, she dimly remembers _the words_. But the drunken _feeling_ is electric as a summer storm and it tastes like night air and scorched earth, but there’s something rotting here, as foul as a broken promise. She can feel it. It’s a punctured, withered root of corruption she can smell like a poisoned wound. Blackened fingernails flutter over the finest of silk cravats, like desperate paper-moths drawn to the candle inside her soul. He has his fingers on her and she burns. Black tar wells up under his florid silk shirt. It feels slick and wicked and terrible; there’s a pulsing heart that beats frantically beneath that dragon-hide breast; there’s a stain of black, bloody gore down the front of her pretty blue dress. His darkness slides between her fingers, viscous and glistening and she can still feel his _human_ heart pounding in his chest where she rests her dirty hands. She should be terrified, she should fight or run. But she wants a taste, just a sip, of his heart that pumps poison. She cannot help herself.

She falls like a piece of porcelain; she anticipates the crunch of heartstrings snapping, the crack of bitterness as her dignity seeps into the carpet. She chips, yes, there is a sting of displeasure, but she feels bound up by warm astonishment as the falling turns into being held. Quick as a fox and just as possessive, the fallen bird is snapped up, and _there_ is the man, in his wide-eyed wonder – _who could ever_ – as strong as man is weak, holding her in those tricky hands.

His fingers were always made to wield power, from the intimate stroke-stroke of slick thread and fibres to that ancient dance of dark wickedness rippling through his fingertips. He plays his hands on her and even through her clothes her skin prickles. He could shake her apart like a rag-doll, but she knows he wouldn’t bother. They are artists hands, built to build, to ripple and splay. The tiny hairs on her skin lift: electric runs through her like a power-cable, as though she’s swallowed sparks. A shallow pulse sets up a hum-beat-beat that has nothing to do with hearts. She _becomes_ , roaring to life in a way only straw-turned-to-gold can feel: transmuted, elemental, distilled. She can feel the darkness building up on her insides. His power thunders through her with all the force of a waterfall. It curdles within her belly and with a sudden sting she recognises that his nature is not kind. The man-beast-magician harnesses the world’s very soul and in payment it has stained him with its indifference. This _she knows_ but she wants to stand in that fall of water and feel him wash over her, as she knows his eyes do. She wants the molecules in her skin – _legs spread wide, hollow bellied, no heart at all_ –to vibrate with the black light in his eyes.

She recalls how the beast would peer down at her, and hungrily bide his time. She stands, barely breathing, beneath his trembling claws and holds that dark, flickering gaze as those pupils dart, linger, calculate and _slide_ down her neck. Her eyes watch his eyes on her throat. He sees within her and there is gold where his eyes wander. He bares those ruined teeth, wracked and cracked; they’ve done some damage over the years, no doubt, and it’s all the better to tear her with. They could dig themselves into her flesh with gleeful enthusiasm, she knows, and chew out her heart. There’s a dark creature buried under the greasy surface of the man, but she wants them both, two sides of the same seductive gold coin, slippery with malice. She yearns for the hot and beating beast, pelt and all. Teeth and claws and savagery altogether, she would guide his foul mouth to her breast.

She dreams of possession, of cages and broken promises and there’s something shaking inside her with anticipation and dread.

To fly from the nest, from the cage _– see the world-_ is frightening. The hand holding the cage open is even more so. She knows something will snag her back, it is a trap. The unexpected thorn on the rose, the needle resting quiet and unassuming on the spindle – _if she’ll have it_ \- a case of a drop of blood and no more said, but her fingers burn, and the blood doesn’t stop – _between her legs-_ just a paper-cut. There’s such a lot of it now, welling in a bead on her finger. The grin widens, the lips part, those ugly teeth glisten with thirst and with deft and conscious hands, he has her finger _–her throat_ –between those vicious lips; the white-heat of his mouth surrounds her and he swallows her blood with gleeful work of his tongue. Her mouth is dry. He could eat her all up. His magic swells and swirls with each eager tonguing and she feels it _tingle in her veins_. But he does not bite. She must be wicked if she wants him to.

He always did sneer and snarl; those articulate lips are cracked too. They are brutal and marred by the lines of feral instinct. The weak always underestimate his clever, tricky tongue. There is a wheedle on the wind, piping and tight as a bow string, compelling in its discordant music. Fools follow him. She knows this tune. It has coaxed agreements and pledges from the lips of grasping mothers, simpering lovers, crumbling kings and even brave young daughters. He plucked her promise from her mouth like an apple from a corpse. The spinner of deals, of fates and of tales listens to them all with a growing appetite. Their vows give him such sweet satisfaction, all magic comes with a price but the price is always delicious, always agony. She would strike a bargain, but she knows she has nothing to give – _it was forever_ – she’s worth nothing. With a syrup tongue, he charms her deeper into herself. His voice is a spell and it weaves around her and pulls _._ The fly, the fruit, the _woman_ beats against it, but his voice is potent as any drug, with her blood on his lips, mouthing her name. Beneath the insidious trill, there grates a melancholy rumble, a trembling burr caught in a velvet breast, and he can use this weapon with equal flair. She twists through his honey-words, feels them sticky on her skin – _she came back_ \- and a tremor rolls through her body as she hesitates. She drinks him in, then reeling, dizzy with sensation, the moment catches on a pause between seconds, between flashing synapses, the association – _nobody would want her_ – in her mind snaps together.

His giggle explodes inside her head and she can’t breathe, she’s falling, trembling and tumbling. The noise is nails on a chalkboard and the voice of her lover and a siren and a song.

Sharp and twittering and indulgent, and so deliciously petty it’s infectious.

She succumbs all over again.

The sensation is akin to eyes crawling along her nape. The beast lurks, the ragged breath catches and she can _feel_ that second before she becomes prey. Before the giggle there is satisfaction. The twitter-snigger breaks over her in a wave of instinctual terror, half-numbed by half-memory, and confusion rushes into the empty spaces in her mind. His strange laughter fills her with an even odder delight, the prickle of almost-touch, hairs brushing in mutual awareness. She can feel him, drawing a breath from the curve of her neck and shoulder. His mouth is in her hair, he inhales her scent as though he will track her. His hands burn her hips with a feather-light embrace. _Mine_ , those fingertips say, she is branded. Now, in this perpetual state of not-mine, not-real, not-here, his minutiae are catalogued and inventoried as she spirals deep, so deep, into the centre of the confusion, the belly of the beast. Her beast. She made a deal for eternity and she keeps her word.

She will not leave him. She drinks deep from the black chalice of his heart; the poison of her promise is sweet on her mouth and she feels light-headed. Oh, to twist round in those arms _– on a string_ \- and claim the beast, demand her own price and bare a grin of her own and ensnare him. To fist her fingers in his hair and make him dance to her singing-song. With vicious bite and possessive grasp, to feel the gold in him warm for her, just for her, and whisper in a lip-twisting trill of her own - _it’s forever._ She wants to consume him. She would taste herself on his mouth and tremble.

She will not leave him.

Not with the flicker of his tongue of her skin – _her thighs burn, the iron rod blisters the flesh_ -  not with his laughter dancing in her mind – _mortify the body to cleanse the soul_ –not while the only thing she clings to are the strands of his thread – _they cut her hair -_ her life-belt in a sea of madness. She remembers, this is no dream, for a second, this is real, the drugs, the drugs, the drugs hum in her mind, his nip of her blood, her head split open, a hand between her thighs as they cleanse her and not even her screams can make him come for her, because she has _forgotten his name_.

The realisation hits her like a whip across her bleeding back.

The ripple of the name still sits on her skin, her heart crumples – _is struck-_ she feels ill, a sting of grief and something kindles but dies. The ember of the name, the root of power in him, the man and beast come roaring through her curdled mind and she can’t give him shape with words, curse the fog in her head.

The last thing Patient 109 thinks before she tumbles into unconsciousness uninterrupted by visions of the dank-dirty grinner, the facetious spinner, the enthusiastic sinner - _the one who won her_ \- is that she will not allow the orderlies to call her ‘dear’. A word echoes in her, twisted lips, twisted fingers, the endearment slips off the tongue like dew from a leaf, a drop of blood from a pinprick, a kiss balanced between two sets of eager teeth, broken by a sigh.

The patient dreams of the time when she remembered his name.


End file.
